Walking with St. Paul Understanding the Holy Spirit as a divine person

Nov 17, 2008

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Corinthians 13:13).

I know! You want to say, "And also with you!" However, I am not writing on the Mass.

This passage ends St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. This is, of course, very Trinitarian. Here St. Paul speaks of our Lord Jesus Christ. He also speaks of God, who at the beginning of the same letter St. Paul calls "God our Father," and "…the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation" (2 Corinthians 1:2, 3). Finally he speaks of the Holy Spirit.

In the previous two columns I wrote about St. Paul’s important teaching on Jesus as fully God and fully man, and the importance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. However, no less significant is St. Paul’s teaching on the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

One of the difficulties we need to overcome when it comes to contemplating the Holy Spirit is to remove from our minds the consideration that the Holy Spirit is just some kind of impersonal force, kind of like what we hear about in "Star Wars." We need to resist the urge of hearing St. Paul’s words, like the lines in the movie, "May the force be with," and perhaps to resist the urge to says "And also with you."

A second difficulty might even come from some of the biblical images of the Holy Spirit: the dove, fire, wind or cloud. The images can help us understand the Holy Spirit, in some limited sense, but we must be careful not to identify the Holy Spirit with these impersonal images. The Holy Spirit is not a bird or a tongue of fire or a gentle or loud wind and certainly not a cumulo-nimbus cloud.

The Holy Spirit is one of the three divine persons of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is "the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified," as we profess belief in every Sunday. We do not worship a bird, fire, wind or clouds; we worship God when we worship the Holy Spirit.

St. Paul helps us to understand this. A person, not an impersonal force, searches all things (1 Corinthians 2:10), knows the mind of God the Father (1 Corinthians 2:11), teaches the content of the Gospel to believers (1 Corinthians 2:13), dwells within believers (1 Corinthians 3:16; Romans 8:11; 2 Timothy 1:14), accomplishes all things (1 Corinthians 12:11), gives life to those who believe (2 Corinthians 3:6), cries out from within our hearts (Galatians 4:6), leads us in the ways of God (Galatians 5:18; Romans 8:14), bears witness with our own spirits (Romans 8:16), has desires that are in opposition to the flesh (Galatians 5:17), helps us in our weakness (Romans 8:26), intercedes on our behalf (Romans 8:26-27), works all things together for our ultimate good (Romans 8:28), strengthens believers (Ephesians 3:16), and is grieved by our sinfulness (Galatians 5:22-23).

We can understand the Holy Spirit as a divine person from the quote we started with: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." We know that the Holy Spirit is not an "it," but a person, a "who."

St. Paul prays that we have fellowship with the Holy Spirit. The Greek word used here is "koinonia," which can also be translated "communion." We cannot have fellowship or communion with a force, a bird, wind, etc.

St. Paul, in this passage, also speaks about the love of God the Father. Love is intimately linked to the Holy Spirit. In Romans, St. Paul says, "…the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Romans 5:5).

The Holy Spirit has been given to us through baptism. "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…" (1 Corinthians 12:13). The Father, through the death, resurrection and ascension of his Son, freely gives us the Spirit so that we might become adopted sons and daughters of the Father (cf. Galatians 4:6). (We will come back to the sacraments in a later column).

We might recall that even Jesus himself said, "But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate [Holy Spirit] will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you" (John 16:7). It is crucial that the Holy Spirit comes so that we might become "…a temple of the Holy Spirit within you…" (1 Corinthians 6:19).

St. Paul also makes clear the Holy Spirit’s connection with Christ when he says, "Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him." (Romans 8:9b).

In order to belong to Christ, we must have the third person of the Holy Trinity dwelling within us, so we pray: "Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of your faithful, grant that by that same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever rejoice in his consolation through Christ our Lord. Amen."